In 2008, the New
York-based artist Ellie Ga joined the crew of the Tara, a sailboat drifting in
the Arctic Ocean as part of a scientific expedition, occupying the incongruous
position of the ship’s “artist-in-residence” among a team of scientific
researchers. The role of “artist in residence” on a scientific expedition is a
malleable one, without clearly defined parameters, thus Ga decided that her
project would be to become the ship’s archivist, attempting to capture the
various facets of life aboard the Tara: the ways in which the crew organized
the world around them without conventional landmarks; how they entertained
themselves; the sense of uncertainty that results from following the whims of
weather patterns, never quite knowing where they would move next; as well as
her own personal associations and insights about the expedition and their
surroundings, unburdened by the demands of scientific fact or reportage.

In the resulting
body of work, which has taken various forms, including lectures, performances,
slideshows, and videos, her personal narratives and memories often occupy a
central role. In the performance Reading
the Deck of Tara at the Lower East Side gallery Bureau in 2011, visitors
were given one-on-one readings with the artist herself, in which she used a
custom deck of cards inspired by those used in fortunetelling to relay aspects
of her life aboard Tara. Each visitor’s particular cards determined the form
and content of the narrative, with each reading—and thus each version of the
story she’d tell—being particular to that visitor, the performance’s element of
chance echoing the movement of a ship adrift.

Ellie Ga, Reading the Deck of Tara installation (2011)

Borrowing methods
from various disciplines, from sociology to fiction writing, Ga is one of a
number of younger contemporary artists whose work is tied to a kind of artistic
fieldwork, investigating aspects of their lives and interests by merging the
apparent objectivity of documentary forms and anthropological research with a
plainly subjective, flexible approach, drawing on multiple methodologies and
discourses. While the “archival impulse” in contemporary art is hardly a new
phenomenon, and research-oriented practices have arguably become the norm
rather than the exception, what seems to differentiate work like Ga’s from
those that fall under the broad, often contested banner of “relational,”
“dialogical,” or “socially-engaged art,” is that the endgame here isn’t to
offer a historiographic corrective or engage an outside community; rather, the
role of artist is treated as license to borrow freely, to temporarily adopt and
explore different modes of working, living, or thinking.

Like Ga, New
York-based Swedish artist Sara Jordenö’s projects also often take the form of
atypical archives, presenting the results of her research in the form of films,
installations, animations, drawings, and text. Heavily informed by sociology,
she has referred to her work as “performative investigations,” highlighting the
tensions implicit in artistic research and the shifting roles she plays in the
process of creating it. The Persona
Project (2000-2010) is a work in seven parts revolving around Ingmar
Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, the
artist’s favorite film. Created over the course of a decade, the resulting
archive examines what Jordenö describes as the film’s “peripheral” voices:
those impacting the film’s creation, circulation, and reception but rarely, if
ever, considered, ranging from translators and voice-over actors to the woman
who lives in the house where Persona
was filmed. Ultimately the archive Jordenö creates with the Persona Project is an idiosyncratic one,
less a portrait of Bergman’s Persona—its
ostensible subject—than a reflection of the artist’s own concerns mediated
through a form of near-obsessive research.

Sara Jordenö , film still from "The Set House (Hedvig)", (2010), from the Persona Project

Sara Jordenö, Installation view of "The Diamond People--Instructions for a film", (2010) at the Bildmuseet, Umeå

Similarly,
her project Diamond People—Instructions
for a film (2010) examines issues of labor and globalization through an
investigation into the synthetic diamond industry in Sweden, South Africa, and
China. However, the project goes beyond merely charting the relationship
between these geographically distant and yet economically intertwined sites.
Combining more typically “documentary” media like photography and video with
drawing, poetry, and animation, the project equally reflects Jordenö’s concern
with the implications of her anthropological approach and her own shifting
relationship to the subjects of her inquiry: one of the places she considers is
her hometown, the Swedish industrial town of Robertsfors, and the synthetic
diamond factory around which life in the community revolves was her first
employer, working in the payroll office during summers as a teenager. The
subtitle, “Instructions for a film,” is itself enigmatic, hinting at something
in need of assembly, as in industrial manufacturing, but also suggesting a
work-in-progress, or perhaps even a coy invitation to the viewer to take up the
task of attempting to resolve the project’s inherent complexities and
contradictions.

Though his
projects might appear, at first glance, to have little in common with Jordenö’s,
the work of Berlin-based British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara is similarly
concerned with adopting multiple roles to probe aspects of his own personal
history, casting himself variously as anthropologist, architect, novelist, and
raconteur. In the project The Museum of
Incest, Fujiwara created a proposal for a museum at the “Cradle of Mankind”
in Africa, where many of the oldest hominid fossils have been discovered. The
premise for Fujiwara’s museum is that the origins of man are rooted in incest,
envisioning an alternative natural history museum in which we are all products
of society’s greatest taboo. Drawing on the conventions of academic lectures
and archaeological displays, the absurd proposal includes an exploration of the
architectural complex that would house the museum, composed of parts of
existing buildings designed by Fujiwara’s architect father.

Likewise, for the
multi-layered project “Welcome to The Hotel Munber,” the artist took
inspiration from a hotel owned and operated by his parents in Franco’s Spain
during the 1970s, reconstructing the hotel bar based on descriptions and
photographs, and attempting to write an erotic novel set in it, casting his
father as the gay protagonist. When presenting the work as a lecture, Fujiwara
similarly adopts a pseudo-academic mode, combining extracts from his
fictionalized narrative of his parents’ life in Spain with their photographs,
memorabilia from the hotel, and newspaper clippings, blurring the boundaries between
the factual and fictional. That a dramatized version of “Welcome to the Hotel
Mumber” formed the second act of Fujiwara’s recent Performa commission “The Boy
Who Cried Wolf” only serves to further challenge our ability to distinguish
between the elements Fujiwara has invented wholesale and those that are
accurate recollections of events

When asked, in a
2009 interview, about the ways in which he adopts various identities in
creating his works, borrowing from their tropes and methodologies, but never
fully conforming to their professional standards, Fujiwara responded:

Who says I’m not a
writer or an architect or anything? Who has the authority to decide these
things? […] Honestly, I am a fraud, I’m an outsider in all these fields, but
this gives me the liberty to work subjectively. Truth and accuracy are not my
concerns. If an academic would work with fiction in this way, it would be
dishonest, wrong even, whereas you’d be a fool to trust an artist in the first
place.

Fujiwara’s quote might arguably best sum up
this tendency: if art can be anything, then the artist can also be anyone.
Though their work is strikingly different in process and final form, Ga, Jordenö,
and Fujiwara, to consider only a few of the artists working in this vein, explore
the possibilities offered by different disciplines, choosing to be as
rigorous—or as lax—as they see fit. Yet, rather than resulting in watered-down
versions of social science, in which the methods of a more supposedly “serious”
field are employed to confer a veneer of relevance or gravity on an artistic
project, the work of these artists is enlivened by the marrying of the
subjective and idiosyncratic with the academic and research-intensive.

For a younger generation of artists, for
whom the use of technology is natural and the Internet an inextricable part of
information gathering, the ability to adopt these various strategies and roles
is greatly enhanced by the accessibility of information: in an Internet age,
the barriers to research begin to collapse. While these projects are typically
presented in a physical format—as an installation, a book, a film, a
performance, and so on—what is striking is that the form itself is flexible;
each of the artists discussed here has presented the results of their research
in multiple different ways, allowing each project to take on several different
incarnations. This, too, arguably reflects a new attitude towards a
research-based practice, and the influence of the digital world: rather than
conceiving of their work as a physical entity, with a particular, fixed form,
it is instead versatile and open-ended.